Here’s another thing we didn’t know about Brad Pitt: the 58-year-old Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood actor reportedly suffers from the neurological disorder, prosopagnosia.
The condition – also referred to as face blindness – means not being able to recognize someone after already meeting them, although Pitt told GQ that “nobody believes” him, and he is desperate to find someone else who suffers from the same condition!
"I wanna meet another," the Bullet Train star told the mag for its August issue, for which he is on the cover. He went on to say that while he hasn’t been officially diagnosed with the condition – although it is something he now wants to get tested for – he knew something was wrong from as early as 2013, as he felt that he was unable to "grasp a face," which he said sometimes caused people to form negative opinions about him.
The Ad Astra actor previously told Esquire that some people may have thought he was too "egotistical" to recognize and remember them, but he wants them to know that that isn’t the case. "So many people hate me because they think I'm disrespecting them," Pitt told Esquire back in 2013 about his inability to recognize faces. "You get this thing, like, 'You're being egotistical. You're being conceited.' But it's a mystery to me, man. I can't grasp a face and yet I come from such a design/aesthetic point of view."
Apparently 1 in 50 people have some form of prosopagnosia, and according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) it is thought to be caused by "abnormalities, impairment or damage" in the brain. It can sometimes be caused by a stroke, a traumatic brain injury, or certain neurodegenerative diseases, but it can also be genetic and be present from birth, and it's reportedly common for the condition to run in families. Pitt has yet to say whether anyone else in his family suffers from the condition.
Prosopagnosia (coming from the Greek word 'prosopon,' which means face, and 'agnosia,' which means ignorance/non-knowledge) reportedly comes in many different forms, and can vary from someone not being able to recognize very familiar faces (e.g., someone in their own family) to struggling with unknown faces. The NINDS also notes that in some cases, someone could also be unable to distinguish how a face is different from an object.
